What’s your Windows Perl environment?

I know that many people use cygwin, and if you do feel free to tell me about it. I’m interested in how you edit files and how you run programs. If you feel like taking a screenshot of your Desktop showing your set up, I’m curious to see what colors you use too. What do you do to personalize your environment?

I use Sublime Text since the late v2 era (now on v3). It’s unfortunately a bit too slow on Windows, not entirely sure why, but even on really performant machines it feels like it’s lagging a little bit. I absolutely love the multi-cursor feature and I’m really happy with it under Linux.

I make some minimal changes to its keyboard layout (Ctrl-Y always sets me off with its default “repeat” function, so I set it to do a delete-line instead (def. Ctrl-Shift-K), and I assign Alt-Bksp to do word-delete because my thumb is too used to doing that in terminals).

Colours are Twilight, with a small hack to make the caret more noticeable (instead of the default white I changed it to #FF00FF). I also have always_show_minimap_viewport and draw_minimap_border on true. All whitespace is shown, only active indent guides are drawn; show_tab_close_buttons is off and highlight_modified_tabs is on – much more noticeable than that little button next to the file name.

I also use Package Control. https://sublime.wbond.net/packages/ModernPerl is a new Perl highlighter, might feel a bit odd at first but is otherwise a lot better than the built-in one. Function Name Display seems useful too (if slightly broken).

The command window? I’ve tried Console2, I love that one can select in it properly, but unfortunately it draws on the screen like a sloth. And it doesn’t alleviate the pain that is the Win2k and onwards behaviour of “doskey” or whatever they call the history navigation feature in cmd.exe. As a zsh/bash kid, I find the awkwardness of the Windows command line hilarious and annoying.

My Windows-related work requires real Windows, so no Cygwin anywhere, and the only bash and GNU tools I get to see is when I compile some external stuff our software uses.

The rest of my environment includes Mercurial and TortoiseHg, and Total Commander.

I use the standard consoles for Windows (cmd.exe and command.exe) under Windows XP and cmd.exe under Windows 7, even though I don’t like Windows 7 at all.
I tried to use cygwin some years ago, but I didn’t like it.

I use TextPad as the general editor, for Perl code and for other things and I like that it offers Perl regular expressions in the latest version. I don’t like that it has a very poor Unicode support, and I think UltraEdit is much better than it for this, but TextPad offers a very cool way of running the programs and displays the results as they appear plus that the programs can be stopped, things which for the moment are not offered by UltraEdit.

I use ActivePerl because it offers features which are not offered by other Perl distributions like Strawberry Perl. Some of these features are:
– If some modules can’t be installed with cpanm or cpan or cpanp, they might be found and installed with ppm and ActiveState offers a pretty large ppm repository + that there are other compatible repositories also.
– ActivePerl is the only Perl distro that can work with ActiveState PDK, and PDK offers some things that can’t be done in Perl directly, like creating COM servers for example.

I also don’t like the command consoles offered by Windows and I will try the alternatives you listed on this site and I hope I will find something better.

Compared with Python (which I don’t use), Perl has a much poorer support for Windows which is something I don’t like, but… that’s life. For example, there is no Perl module that can be used to create an SSH client that works under Windows and which can do a password-based authentication, the modules that can access WordPress API are much poorer than the modules for other languages, like Python for example.

I use Mercurial in command line directly, because it is easier to use than the complicated GIT and it can do much more than I need anyway.

I used mod_perl but now I prefer plack/psgi and I don’t like that some of the newest Perl modules are not portable and work only under Unix and Unix-like systems, so I can’t develop my programs under Windows and run them under Linux in production as easy as I would like.